Description
In this remarkable short book, the foremost intellectual of our age brings a lifetime of erudition to bear on a subject that he has grappled with for decades, and whose future is profoundly uncertain. The Idea of Europe finds George Steiner reckoning with Europe from a number of different angles. Europe, he writes, is the place where Goethe's garden almost borders on Buchenwald, where the house of Corneille abuts on the market-place in which Joan of Arc was hideously done to death. It is, in other words, a continent rich with contradiction, whose many tensions - cultural, social, political, economic, and religious - have for centuries conspired to pull it apart, even as it has become more unified.